NOT DESIGNATED FOR PUBLICATION

DENNIS R. BAGNERIS, Sr., Judge.

Plaintiff, Sandra Pace, filed a complaint against defendant, Gulf Coast Bank & Trust Company ("Bank"), for failure to credit her account for unauthorized electronic withdrawals. After a trial on the merits, the trial judge found in favor of Ms. Pace and awarded damages in the amount of $42,960.00. The Bank now appeals this final judgment. For the following reasons, we affirm.

FACTS

The Bank issued Ms. Pace a Visa Check Card/ATM card on March 26, 2007. On February 21, 2008, Ms. Pace received a call from Mary Ockman, the manager of the Bank, notifying her that money was missing from her personal savings and checking accounts possibly due to unauthorized withdrawals. Ms. Pace immediately drove to the Bank, where she was provided with printouts of her transaction history and asked to verify which transactions were not authorized. According to Ms. Pace, she was instructed by Ms. Ockman to put down all transactions that were suspicious "just in case, `till all the police detectives and all the work was in." Ms. Pace's debit/ATM card was deactivated on February 21, 2008 due to the detection of disputed transactions, her savings account was closed on February 25, 2008, and her checking account was closed on February 27, 2008. The investigation reflected that Mr. Jeffrey McCray, a man Ms. Pace friended in a casino on September 12, 2007, made the unauthorized withdrawals. Mr. McCray was subsequently arrested and pled guilty to Access Device Fraud and was sentenced to five years at hard labor.

Ms. Pace sought restitution from the Bank by subsequently filing reimbursement claims encompassing a total of 211 disputed ATM withdrawal transactions made between October 6, 2007 and February 22, 2008. Ms. Pace submitted an affidavit disputing electronic transactions totaling $48,774, which included 206 transactions totaling $47,124 from her savings account and 5 transactions totaling $1,650 from her checking account. On March 6, 2008, the Bank denied Ms. Pace's request for reimbursement finding that "the disputed ATM withdrawal activity had actually been authorized by the accountholder" and that "even if the bank had determined that the disputed withdrawals were `unauthorized', Ms. Pace failed to comply with the 60 day deadline established by Regulation E. thereby alleviating the bank from any liability incurred in relation to disputed activity initiated against the customer's accounts, subsequent to December 29, 2007."

On February 23, 2009, Ms. Pace filed suit against the Bank for its failure to credit her account for the unauthorized withdrawals initiated by Mr. McCray. At trial, Ms. Pace only contested the unauthorized transfers from December 17, 2007 until February 18, 2008 and indicated that the withdrawals from October 6-7, previously marked as "unauthorized" were done so out of an abundance of caution and that they were later believed to be authorized transactions. After reviewing the evidence and arguments, the trial court awarded Ms. Pace $42,960.00 in damages but denied Ms. Pace's request for attorney's fees and treble damages.

STANDARD OF REVIEW

In Louisiana, appellate courts review both law and facts. La. Const. Art. V, Sec. 10(B). The standard of review for a factual finding is the manifestly erroneous or clearly wrong standard. To reverse a fact finder's determination under this standard of review, an appellate court must undertake a two-part inquiry: (1) the court must find from the record that a reasonable factual basis does not exist for the finding of the trier of fact; and (2) the court must further determine the record establishes the finding is clearly wrong. Stobart v. State, through Dept. of Transp. and Development, 617 So.2d 880, 882 (La.1993). The issue to be resolved by the reviewing court is not whether the trier of fact was right or wrong, but whether the fact finder's conclusion was a reasonable one. Stobart, 617 So.2d at 882. If the factual findings are reasonable in light of the record reviewed in its entirety, a reviewing court may not reverse, even though convinced that had it been sitting as the trier of fact, it would have weighed the evidence differently. Stobart, 617 So.2d at 882-883. Accordingly, where there are two permissible views of the evidence, the fact finder's choice between them cannot be manifestly erroneous. Stobart, 617 So.2d at 883. Further, when a fact finder's determination is based on its decision to credit the testimony of one of two or more witnesses, that finding can virtually never be manifestly erroneous or clearly wrong. Rosell v. ESCO, 549 So.2d 840, 844-45 (La.1989). The credibility determinations of the trier of fact are subject to the strictest deference under the manifest error-clearly wrong standard. Theriot v. Lasseigne, 93-2661 (La.7/5/94), 640 So.2d 1305, 1313.

DISCUSSION

The Electronic Funds Transfer Act ("EFTA") as codified in 15 U.S.C. § 1693g, and section 205.6 of Regulation E (12 C.F.R. § 205.6) are the regulations prescribed by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in order to carry out the purposes of the EFTA. In order to show the framework of responsibility for unauthorized transactions, we set out extensive portions of 15 United States Code Annotated section 1693g, with the provisions directly applicable to this case emphasized:

Section 205.6 of Regulation E essentially mirrors 15 United States Code section 1693g, and in particular provides:

Thus, under the EFTA and Regulation E, a bank customer has the duty to notify his or her bank that an account error exists within 60 days of receiving a bank statement or other notification and to report any loss or theft of a card or other means of access within two business days after the consumer learns of the loss or theft. Applying the EFTA and Regulation E to the case at bar, Ms. Pace had a duty to notify the Bank of any errors or unauthorized ATM transactions within 60 days after receiving documentation of the electronic transfer. Thereafter, the burden of proof is on the Bank to prove that the debits were authorized and that the loss would not have occurred but for her failure to report Mr. McCray's transfers within sixty days of transmittal of her periodic statement. At trial. Ms. Pace testified that she never gave Mr. McCray her ATM card or PIN number. Ms. Pace indicated that she always kept her card in her purse and did not authorize anyone else to use her ATM card. She testified that the PIN number she selected was her street address number and that her PIN number was the same number she used for various casino player cards. Ms. Pace testified that Mr. McCray did have knowledge of her casino player card PIN number but that she was completely unaware that he had been using her ATM card to withdraw money from her account. Ms. Pace testified that even though she listed the two transactions from October as being unauthorized, she was told by Ms. Ockman to list all transactions that were questionable in order to have a full investigation prepared on the accounts. Ms. Pace further testified that she was not aware of her checking account balance and the unauthorized transactions that had occurred from December 17, 2007 through February 18, 2008 until she was alerted by Ms. Ockman on February 21, 2008.

Although the Bank contends that the evidence demonstrated that Ms. Pace provided her ATM card and/or PIN number to Mr. McCray and thus authorized the disputed transactions, the trial court found otherwise stating that "the testimony elicited by Ms. Pace at trial regarding the unauthorized ATM transactions conducted by Mr. McCray believable," especially in light of Mr. McCray's conviction of access device fraud in relation to the unauthorized withdrawals on Ms. Pace's account. Further, the trial court was confronted with two permissible views of the evidence as to whether the unauthorized transactions began in October of 2007 or December of 2007. We find no manifest error with the trial court's decision to credit Ms. Pace's testimony that the unauthorized transactions began in December 2007 and that she was merely advised to mark the October 2007 transactions out of an abundance of caution.

After reviewing the evidence, we find that Ms. Pace met her burden of proving that (1) she did not initiate the withdrawals in question, (2) she did not authorize Mr. McCray to make them, and (3) she properly notified the Bank within sixty days of the unauthorized activity that began in December of 2007. For the foregoing reasons, and in view of the fact that the primary purpose of the EFT Act and the Regulation promulgated thereunder is the protection of individual consumers, we find that the trial court correctly ruled in favor of Ms. Pace in the amount of $42,960.00.

AFFIRMED.